The phenomenal growth of the Internet has extended computer-related technology and web-based services to a vast number of countries around the world. To realize the potential of such a market, providers of web-based services must take into account a large number of different languages spoken by computer users in all of these countries. Even in cultures that use similar languages (e.g. U.S. English vs. U.K. English) the differences in the cultures and the language can require different versions of web-based services for each culture.
Providing different versions of the same service can create maintenance nightmares for web service providers. Consider a web site that supports one or more media player applications, including providing artist and album information to users. Maintaining a different version of all such information for each culture reached by the service and keeping projects consistent with each other is virtually impossible.
A previous attempt to solve this problem was to create a piece of shared code that could be included in a given project and called whenever a particular piece of content needed to be localized. While the solution works, it also causes a significant amount of source code calls to be interspersed with standard HTML tags, and other content. The approach is also somewhat error-prone and leads to pages of content that can be difficult to read, debug and maintain.